How to Build Your Own Lifestream with Yahoo Pipes and NO Server Side Logic
Step 2: Add More Lifestream Data
The cool thing from Yahoo Pipes is that you can actually reuse existing Pipes into other pipes. This is why I started my project with a pipe that just took my blog posts, and then could use that pipe in my new pipe that would create my lifesteam. I soon ran into a few problems though that had to be solved which is why I made a very generic “LifestreamItem” pipe that would be used (together with my blog posts pipe) inside the super-pipe. Take a quick look at the “LifestreamItem” by going to the pipe’s source or take a look below:
As you can see this is a very generic module that is simply intended to be used in a other product (use it if you need it!). It takes 5 user inputs (user inputs can be inputed in many ways, more in a moment) which are:
- link: Simply the url of the rss feed of data you would like to fetch. Could be a blog, could be delicious, could be Flickr.
- cache: This is something to prevent caching, I will explain later.
- id: This is a simple identifier, like the one used in the blog posts pipe to identify what the source of the lifestream item is. It’s an easy way to identify that Flickr photos are from flickr as later on all lifestream items will be united into one feed.
- del: I noticed that some feeds had completely different unix times than they were supposed to have, so I added this parameter to be able to time-shift the separate feeds to be able to sync them all to the same time frame, making sure that things sort properly.
- fid: This is a very dirty hack to get the parameters of a Flickr feed added. Very dirty and I don’t dare to explain why I did it.
This module is pretty useful. It makes it possible to get a feed from any site - including Flickr, Delcious, Twitter - and quickly modify it to easily use it in the super lifestream pipe that I will describe next. This “small” pipe takes a few parameters that take care of some problems I had with Yahoo Pipes.
